Have thumbs, will text
Published 3:29 pm Friday, June 19, 2009
While cell phones certainly appear to be recession-proof, they are still no match for a hammer.
A Wyoming father is probably feeling some regret for smashing his daughter’s LG phone in April after receiving a monthly Verizon bill for $4,756.25 — the price for sending about 10,000 text messages, and receiving 10,000 text messages, when your plan doesn’t include texting. (A TV station calculated that works out to more than 300 texts over eight hours, every day). Never mind, of course the dad still relishes beating that phone into 10,000 pieces. But the maker of his 13-year-old daughter’s former phone have offered her and her dad something to strive for, or another reason to break out the hammer, depending on your point of view:
Last week 15-year-old Kate Moore of Des Moines won the LG U.S. National Texting Championship in New York, an annual event since 2007. She beat out 20 other finalists to win the final prize of $50,000.
That’s correct. A 15-year-old won $50,000 for her speedy and accurate texting.
If Gregg and Jaylene Christoffersen of Wyoming allow their daughter Dena to text again, she could enter the contest next year to pay off that $4,756.25 bill and still have some money left over for like, college. But to win, she will have to practice, practice, practice. The competition is fierce, as Kate Moore discovered.
Over two days, she bested other contestants at challenges such as texting blindfolded and texting while maneuvering through a moving obstacle course. In the final round, she was the first to text an error-free modified chorus from “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
Will Kate use her superpowers for good or evil?
It sounds so silly to reward these “skills” … unless one imagines a rescue worker, making her way through a dark, confusing, massive destruction zone to find trapped victims and texting her location as she goes.
How else does such talent translate? A theater usher who can seat people and text her friends at the same time? A waitress in that one New York restaurant that serves food in the dark?
Video game aficionados (Spanish for “addicts”) like to point out that their pastime improves eye-hand coordination — studies show that surgeons who specialize in minimally-invasive surgery and play video games work more quickly and perform with fewer errors than those who don’t play video games.
But texting has no such saving grace — no one wants a surgeon who is all thumbs. In fact, ardent texters are showing up in doctor’s offices with raging cases of Texter’s Thumb. Followed by their fathers, with old-school Hammer Thumb.
